Recently I’ve explained on how to treat your SSD with care and how to keep it tuned up. In this topic I am going to explain and elaborate on HDDs. Hard Disk Drive or HDD are mechincal storage computer devices. The first HDD was invented by IBM in 1956, but they didn’t store as much as 2TB until now. As time progresses the storage compression also increases – according to Moore’s law. Old HDDs used to come in larger form factors: like 8 inch as well as 5 ¼ inch HDDs. But today the PC only sell 3 ½ inch or 2 ½ inch internal HDDs. However SSDs appears to be superceding HDDs and could eventually replace them, but it is likely to compement Hybrid Drives like Solid State Hybrid Drives or SSHD. If you want a HDD but want a combination of the SSDs NAND or FLASH Memory cells in your storage drive, well yes you can. SSHD only give you around a little of the SSD storage whereas the HDD section can have the storage approximately 30 times than SSD. SSHD doesn’t quite signifiancly boost your disk performance – depending on your SSHDs firmware that determines which frequencly used file or system is allocated in the NAND cells. So really...it depends for which kind or storage drive suits your convenience. A 3 ½ inch internal HDD compared to a 2 ½ inch SSD can have a variation around 15 times more storage – at it’s equilvent selling price. If you want to know more on hybrid drives you can find out here:-

Now I’m pretty sure your big question on your mind is “how long does a HDD last for?” Well it depends how careful you treat your HDD. Most HDD last around a average of 5 years – on its full use for storage. There are some environmental and physical factors that can significantly impact your HDD: first factor is physical shock or knock impact. Bare in mind that HDDs is a mechanical storage drive, and contains moving parts which are fragile. The magnetic disk platter and HDD Head are very senisitive and will cause bad sectors or HDD failures due to wear-and-tear, high humid conditions, stiction and extreme temperatures. You cannot really buy a hard drive to last forever but they are a good purpose for large archival storage, but not as good as M-Disc as those discs supposed to last for centuries. How is that possible? Well if you don’t want to subscribe to DropBox Pro for over 1TB storage in case you are not comfortable for paying for the extra storage or want to store your sensitive private data online, then you can store them in your external HDD and putting it in a safe secure vault. You can still use DropBox free storage with its Auto Backup background task to keep your important files like college Word Documents, Powerpoints, Spreadsheets or essays safe. As they don’t use as much storage compared to a 1 hour 4K camcorder video clip or having 80,000 mp3 files stored – as they take up a lot of GB of storage. As you know already that a HDD can lose its performance when installing too many programs or not sorting out your data in a neat pattern inside your HDD. Say you wanted to uninstall Counter-Strike Source around 16GB of data, including its map data then your HDD will leave a spaced section – like a missing gap between your train set. When installing a new game around 20GB then the 16GB gap will be filled for the train set cos the new cabin coupled to your train. But the remaining 4GB data required out of the 20GB new game data to be filled will need to be filled in front of the locomotive. Imagine you are a train driver and cannot see or go safely as the train car in front of you blocking your visual and your coal cart is 2 train cars away required to refuel your locomotive. This is known as Data Fragmentation, and that can slow your HDD. So using Disk Defrag can rearrange your data – whereas your train set metaphorically speaking to be arranged for the train driver to see and proceed safely, and can quickly refuel as the coal isn’t to far away. For improving your HDD life span, there are some essential programs like SMART or Western Digital Data LifeGuard which can come in handy. If you want to learn more on HDD lifespan and archival purposes, you can find out here:-

So now that we know why HDDs are still on the market but how long for? Will the HDDs phase out in around 12 years or will they remain? Well even though that SSDs won't replace Hybrid Drives, but HDD manufacturers appear to be continuing on significantly increasing its storage capacity by using Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording or HAMR along with Helium filled HDDs. What it does is it makes the HDD storage data more smaller inside the magnetic disk platter as well use more platters for extra storage. If you want to learn more on the future use of Data Storage, you can look at this video below to learn more:-

So lastly, what do YOU think on the future of data storage and which sort of storage device do you use a lot and explain more in its purpose?

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